Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"In 1986, Thomas W. Schoener wrote a thought-provoking book chapter describing ecological communities along five organismal and five environmental axes. It was thought-provoking in the sense that Schoener attempted to unify community ecology using a minimal set of variables at a time when ecologists were doubtful of any unifying principle in community ecology. After three decades of Schoener's chapter, community ecologists are still divided about whether there could be a general theory of community... Mark Vellend elegantly attempts to bridge this divide by introducing the theory of high-level processes in ecological communities in his Princeton Population Monograph entitled The Theory of Ecological Communities."--Madhav P. Thakur, Trends in Ecology and Evolution "Vellend (biology, Univ. de Sherbrooke, Canada) provides a useful historical account of the wide variety of methods used in the field to lay the foundation for his proposed resolution of the resulting 'mess.' The book is well written, profusely referenced, and a worthy addition to the distinguished 'Monographs in Population Biology' series from Princeton University Press."--Choice
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii 1. Introduction 1 PART I APPROACHES, IDEAS, AND THEORIES IN COMMUNITY ECOLOGY 2. How Ecologists Study Communities 9 3. A Brief History of Ideas in Community Ecology 20 PART II THE THEORY OF ECOLOGICAL COMMUNITIES 4. The Pursuit of Generality in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology 39 5. High-Level Processes in Ecological Communities 49 6. Simulating Dynamics in Ecological Communities 69 PART III EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE 7. The Nature of Empirical Evidence 93 8. Empirical Evidence: Selection 107 9. Empirical Evidence: Ecological Drift and Dispersal 138 10. Empirical Evidence: Speciation and Species Pools 158 PART IV CONCLUSIONS, REFLECTIONS, AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS 11. From Process to Pattern and Back Again 175 12. The Future of Community Ecology 182 References 193 Index 225
